This week: holograms you can touch and feel, a Social Media Apocalypse, what is customer experience, a fight on who unfollowed who the first on Twitter and information about the most engaged brands on social media.

Social collaboration tools

• The 3 Fundaments of Online Strategy
• Stryder: ‘I axed Harris from Twitter first’
  Tinchy Stryder has claimed that he removed Calvin Harris from Twitter before the Scottish dance star deleted him.
• The Only Way To Keep Everyone Active
• Social Desktop
  Core idea of the Social Desktop is to connect to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself.
• Balancing Technology and Culture During a Social Business Implementation

Customer Experience

• Customer Experience Is Not About Coffee
• Ryanair’s Terrible Customer Experience May Be Just Right “
  In what seems to be a low point for airline customer experience, Ryanair might start charging passengers to go to the bathroom. This discount airline doesn’t cut any slack for its customers. It charges for even slightly overweight luggage and extra carry-ons like duty-free shopping bags, and offers no refunds or apologies.
• Capgemini’s Customer Experience Blog

Social Media Apocalypse

• Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter
  The cyber attacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.
• Twitter attack: Bots may have been hardest hit
• Was yesterday’s Social Media Apocalypse an attack on one man?
• Twitter’s “Harsh and Cold” Honesty Tells Devs No ETA for Fixes
• The Adventure Continues

Research

• ENGAGEMENTdb: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media
• Social Networking on Intranets
  Community features are spreading from “Web 2.0″ to “Enterprise 2.0.” Research across 14 companies found that many are making productive use of social intranet features.
• Trends: Visualizing the Social Software and Collaboration Marketplace
  Here’s our simple division of the enterprise social software and collaboration marketplace, into six categories. I don’t claim that this is a complete list of vendors — just a categorization of the most important ones on enterprise buyers’ short lists today. It also does not confer any “leadership” status; a magic sextant this is not. But it does tell you where a vendor resides on the landscape.
• Gartner Social Software Hype Cycle 2009
  Gartner maintains a series of well-followed reports, called Hype Cycles. The Social Software Hype Cycle highlights the most important technologies that support rich social interactions
• Burson-Marsteller Social Media Fortune 100 (research)

Web development

• Just When You Thought IE6 Would Die…
• Mastering CSS, Part 1: Styling Design Elements
• Build Your Own URL Shortener

Tools

• Make Microsoft Outlook More Social
• Ginipic: Neat Image Search App For Web And Desktop
• Sigil
  Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.

General

• Can the Rock Band Network Transform the Music Industry?
  When the Rock Band Network — essentially an App Store for musicians who want to upload and sell Rock Band-playable versions of their songs — opens for business later this year, it has the potential to transform the music industry by giving musicians large and small a distribution platform on one of the few online services that’s managed to successfully monetize music downloads. If, that is, the Network can make their songs easy to find and enjoyable to play.
• APIs Critical to Facebook’s Plans to Dominate Real Time Search
  As Facebook continues its major push toward greater user openness (a la Twitter) this year, two product priorities are leading the way. First, Facebook’s new privacy controls will make it easier for Facebook users to share content publicly with everyone. Second, Facebook’s new real time search engine is designed to make it easier to find content your friends – or any Facebook users – have shared.
• Will Videoconferencing Kill Business Class Travel?
• Learning from Games: A Language for Designing Emotion
• Augmented Reality: Mobile Marketing infusion
  I do believe these are the opportunities and purposes where Mobile Marketing and the role of mobiles devices have been waiting for, enabled by: Augmented Reality.
• The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about
• Spotify, Napster and The Quest For Premium Music Dollars
• What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way – Anil Dash
  Google Wave is an impressive set of technologies, the kind of stunningly slick application that literally makes developers stand up and cheer. I’ve played with the Google Wave test sandbox a bit, and while it’s definitely too complex to live up to the “this will replace email!” hype that greeted its launch, it certainly has some cool features. So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.
• A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines
• Holograms That You Can Touch and Feel
  Holograms are cool. But holograms you can actually touch? A team of researchers from The University of Tokyo has created just such a technology. The tactile hologram, which is being shown-off this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans, actually involves two basic pieces: A hologram, which is generated simply by shining an LCD projector onto a concave mirror, and a novel technique which creates ultrasonic waves.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious